You must remove the sides those are the wagons face up each other first.There in no screws,do not use sharp object,these parts are plastic.Use youn nail or a toothpick.You bought a perfect train.

All cars light up except the last one.

To open a car, remove the blue end caps gently. Once those blue plastic ends are off, you can pry the side of the aluminum body off at any point and it comes up and reveals all of the innards (thanks Will Goodnight, foumaro, mikec).

We can see that the springs in one of the cars (either the one that didn't light up or the previous one or both) don't make contact properly.

So, now that we have two cars open, it's decision time: 1) get rid of the spring/plate contraption and simply use a wire; 2) replace the light bulbs with LEDs and associated rectifier/etc. as I've done with my Harry Potter cars.

Thanks for the hints.

Regards,

Tony

Hi,

While you are referring to the observation car, the photos of the opened car show a dome car. AFAIK the worm-like observation car at the train end is feeding (via a pickup shoe) and controlling (via a decoder) the lights in all cars. I opened one of my 26600 California Zephyr dome cars for comparison (see photo) which doesn’t contain any of the fancy electronics displayed.

I am also surprised that you found light bulbs installed in the consist (not to mention that fiddling around with “mechanic” coupler springs would have any impact on the electric lighting). A humble question: Did try to couple the troublemaker directly to the “feeder” car (thus having only two cars on rails), then swapping directions to see if that produces any result?

Interesting, that made me curious, so I opened my domed observation car, too:

On the last photo the “mouse piano” for the decoder address is visible.

Thanks for the pictures
I like this train a lot. I also like converting all bulb lighting by LEDs: much more reliable, low consumption and evenly distributed lighting
Bravo
Here are some of my conversions

Cheers
Jean

Well, that worked out okay. The pickup shoe in the observation car is now gone and all car lights are controlled by a relay set by the function key. Still two cars to convert.

Cheers

IMG_7159.mov (4,593kb) downloaded 6 time(s).
IMG_7152.mov (760kb) downloaded 7 time(s).

Decoder removed, view before changes.

Line filters under the decoder.

Red wire to main pickup shoe.

Relay.
IMG_7155.mov (1,295kb) downloaded 8 time(s).
Relay working.

Two new red wires between units: pickup shoe to relay and relay to cc coupler

Current-conducting coupler hooked up.

Pickup shoe be gone!

Edited by user 03 September 2020 13:26:40(UTC)  | Reason: captions